Fredhopper Merchandising Studio is your central tool for managing how shoppers find and interact with products on your web store. This guide walks you through what the Merchandising Studio does, how to navigate it, and where to go to learn more about each feature.

What Fredhopper Merchandising Studio does

Fredhopper Merchandising Studio connects to your web store to give you control over the shopper experience. You can manage how products are discovered, sorted, and displayed without needing to touch the underlying product data.

Fredhopper gives you capabilities across five key areas:

Search

Help shoppers find what they're looking for quickly and accurately. Fredhopper search includes:

Product and content search across your catalogue and additional sources
Predictive search that suggests products, categories, or keywords as shoppers type
Fine-tuning tools such as stemming, linguistic analyzers, synonyms, and redirects
Multi-lingual search, spell correction, and fuzzy search

Navigation

Give shoppers a clear path through your catalogue. Fredhopper navigation includes:

Automatically generated categories and facets based on your product data model
Configurable and context-sensitive facets
Business rules to control how navigation results are sorted, filtered, and displayed

Personalization

Show shoppers products that are relevant to them. Fredhopper personalization includes:

Product recommendations based on personal data provided by you
Recommendations based on crowd behavior and the current shopper's activity
Business rules to control when, where, and how personalized recommendations appear

Merchandising

Take control of how your products are presented. Fredhopper merchandising includes:

Image and text banners
Configurable product collections with sorting, filtering, and display conditions
Precision filtering and sorting using single attributes or complex ranking cocktails
Context-sensitive business rules to target the right shoppers at the right time

Recommendations

Surface the right products across the shopper journey. Fredhopper recommendations include:

Recommendations on home, lister, basket, and product detail pages
Hand-picked or automatically configured item recommendations
Personalized recommendations based on your data or crowd behavior
Cross-sell and up-sell recommendations

How to navigate the Merchandising Studio

Log in to the Merchandising Studio using your credentials. The Studio opens on the Campaigns tab by default. Use the menu bar at the top to move between features.

Feature navigation: The top menu bar where you switch between features such as Campaigns, Ranking rules, Facets, and more.
Feature options: Create a new configuration, delete one, add labels, send for publication, or use additional options to copy, move, or archive configurations.
Homepage list: shows all configured items for the selected feature, including name, scope, triggers, and applied rules. When you've selected a scope, you'll also see each item's priority. Priority determines the order in which rules display on your site. Specific rules should sit at a higher priority than default rules, as default rules only apply when no higher-priority rule is met. You can reorder priority by editing the number and pressing Enter.
Shortcuts panel: Filter and manage items within the current feature.
Preview: Open your Preview site to see how configurations look before publishing.

Merchandising Studio features

The Fredhopper Merchandising Studio is organized around a set of features. Each one controls a different aspect of the shopper experience.

Campaigns

Campaigns let you display content that inspires shoppers to engage with your products. There are four campaign types:

Text: Supply additional text content to the front end, or redirect shoppers to a new URL
Images: Display banners or homepage images to inspire purchases
Image with multiple links: Add clickable hotspots to a single image, each redirecting to a different location or URL
Items: Serve additional products to the front end, typically for upsell scenarios such as "You may also like" or "Recommended for you"

Learn more: Find more information in Getting started with campaigns.

Ranking rules

Ranking rules govern the order in which products are returned to shoppers on search and category lister pages. You can create rules at a site-wide or category level using one or more product attributes, including ranking attributes, to control how items are sorted. When multiple items share the same attribute value, additional sorting actions determine their order.

Learn more: Find more information in Getting started with ranking rules.

Ranking attributes (cocktails)

Ranking attributes (also referred to as ranking cocktails) let you combine multiple metrics to sort products simultaneously, rather than relying on a single sort alone. You can apply ranking attributes to category and search pages, product recommendations, carousels, and modification groups.

Learn more: Find more information in Getting started with ranking attributes.

Result modifications

Result modifications let you fine-tune the product list after a ranking rule has been applied. You can pin one or more products to a specific position, or block products from appearing in results altogether.

Important: Result modifications always take priority over ranking rules. It's best to define a solid ranking rule first, then use result modifications to merchandise on top of it.

Learn more: Find more information in Getting started with result modifications,

Facets

Facets help shoppers filter and find products intuitively. They are typically shown in a sidebar or at the top of a product lister page. Setting up facets gives your site structure and makes it easier for shoppers to refine results in large categories or search results. The facets that make sense for your site will depend on the level of attribution in your product data.

Learn more: Find more information in Getting started with facets.

Redirects

Redirects let you send shoppers to a fixed location when they enter a specific search query, instead of returning search results. This is useful for branded searches or campaign-specific queries.

Learn more: Find more information in Getting started with redirects.

Synonyms

Synonyms ensure shoppers find relevant products even when they use different words to describe the same thing without you having to change any product data. For example, you can configure "tv" to also return results for "television", or "women's underwear" to return lingerie products.

Learn more: Find more information in Getting started with synonyms.

Publication

All configurations must be published before they go live on your site. You can review saved configurations in Preview before publishing to confirm everything looks correct.

Note: Once published, the point at which changes appear on your live site depends on your cache process.

Learn more: Getting started with publication

System

System settings control internal configuration details for the Fredhopper software.

Warning: Misconfiguring system settings can cause malfunctions. Changes here should only be made by your internal Fredhopper Merchandising Studio superuser or a technical consultant at Rezolve AI.

How to navigate the Shortcuts panel

The Shortcuts panel appears on every feature homepage. It helps you filter and manage the items configured within that feature.

Scopes

At the top of the Shortcuts panel, you'll find a scope drop-down. Scopes are a way to separate your business areas and are typically used to distinguish between different locales. Each scope can have its own language settings, special characters, and currency symbols. If you only have access to one scope, the drop-down won't show additional options.

Note: You can modify scopes from the Management tab under System in the Merchandising Studio. For help with this, contact your internal superuser or a Rezolve AI technical consultant.

How to filter items in the Shortcuts panel

Below the scope drop-down, the Shortcuts panel lets you filter the current feature's items by:

All: View every configured item
Pending: Items awaiting publication
Archived: Configurations that can be restored, edited, and re-published at any time
Recycle bin: Deleted items that can be restored
My items: Items you've personally created for the current feature

Important: Items in the recycle bin are permanently deleted after 30 days with no warning.

You can also filter by editor, last modified date, trigger, or action type, for example, filtering to show only image campaigns. This is useful when troubleshooting or searching for a specific configuration.

Using labels to organize configurations

When creating any configuration, it's good practice to add a label. Labels make it easier to find items later. Set up a clear, consistent naming convention and apply it every time you create something new. You can create labels, change their color, rename them, and filter by label name.

How to navigate Preview

Preview gives you a visual representation of your web store with your Merchandising Studio configurations applied. You can check how rules and configurations affect your site before publishing them live.

Triggers panel: Apply triggers manually to replicate the conditions set up in your rules or configurations, so you can see how they behave.
Create New: Set up a new rule or configuration directly from Preview. If you've navigated to a category or performed a search, clicking Create New takes you to the Merchandising Studio with that context pre-filled, saving you setup time.
Studio navigation: Switch back to the Merchandising Studio from Preview, and vice versa.
Configuration details: View any facets or campaigns applied to the page you're looking at, and drill into the underlying XML data file.